The Serpent's Gift - Hardcover

Helen Elaine Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074721168X ISBN 13: 9780747211686

Publisher: Headline Book Publishing, 1994

Synopsis

One of the most striking and heartening developments in American letters in recent years has been the flowering and attendant celebration of African-American writers and of books that have introduced to readers everywhere people, situations, and events that have, hitherto, largely been ignored, denied, or unknown. Now comes Helen Elaine Lee's supremely assured The Serpent's Gift, a first novel that gives to us -- with the fullest emotional resonance, humor, and exultation in the novelist's art -- the intertwined stories of two families from early in this century to our own times.
Central to this haunting (and sometimes haunted) novel are the mothers, a study in contrast in strength and rigidity, Ruby Staples and Eula Smalls, and their children: LaRue Smalls, adventurer, storyteller, and chronicler of his people; his sister Vesta, intimidated by life from an early age, yet determined, valiant even, to hold her disparate family together; and Ouida Staples, a rare beauty who elects, in the face of convention, to spend her life with another woman. Each will face trials and challenges and sometimes be transformed, shedding like the serpent, an old skin, reborn by the art of invention.
From its opening pages, which recount in eerily compelling detail, the death that will bring these people together, to its almost pastoral conclusion, The Serpent's Gift creates a world that is both realistic in its detail and lyrical in its presentation -- it is a superb, triumphant debut.

About this title

About the Author:

Helen Elaine Lee was born and grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She teaches in the Program in Writing and Humanities Studies at M.I.T. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A richly textured first novel that begins with lyrical evocations of loss and love in two intertwined African-American families, but which later becomes more synopsis than saga. In a nameless midwestern city, in 1910, the already fragile marriage of Eula and Ontario Smalls ends with Ontario's fatal fall while cleaning windows. Eula, with children Vesta and baby LaRue, is taken in by neighbors Ruby and Polaris Staples. The families had first met when Eula, badly beaten by Ontario, had fled with her two children and Ruby had been the only neighbor on the street willing to take her in. The two families now begin to live together with remarkable ease. Young Vesta is treated by Ouida, the Staples' only daughter, as the sister she'd always wanted; little LaRue and Ruby share a common delight in stories and creating beautiful things; and Eula, though scarred, finds solace in her work and in the affectionate security the Staples home provides. But as the story moves forward, the pace of events both personal and public accelerates, shortchanging plot and character along the way. Only LaRue's ``famous'' stories about Miss Snake, although they too lose much of their early charm as they multiply, seem to slow down the apparent rush to be done with the story. Vesta, forever affected by her family's past, lives a life of rigid order, only slightly relieved by the joy of raising the child during whose birth Ruby dies; Ouida, after a few failed affairs, finds true love with another woman; and LaRue, Ruby's male alter ego, becomes the family's nurturer and chronicler, who offers himself as the serpent's gift, the doorway ``to the things that had happened before, to the things that had happened between them--to their history.'' The seismic changes in race relations are perceptively noted, as are the realities of African-American lives, but the cursory treatment that results from the sprint to get it all down mars what could have been a magnificent African-American saga. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline Book Publishing
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 074721168X
• ISBN 13: 9780747211686
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384